It's quite the quirk of fate that Albert Rivera, the politician who claims (with no merit whatsoever, although that's a different question) to be Adolfo Suárez's political heir, should have fallen flat on his face a 15th June, a symbolic date among the former prime minister's milestones, being the date in 1977 he won the first post-dictatorship election with the defunct UCD. Whilst that 15th June carried Súarez to the Olympus of elected officials, winning the first election over Fraga, Felipe and Carrillo, 42 years later Rivera was starting on what has been the worst week for him since he started in politics.
In just seven days, he's lost support internationally, once Macron and the Germans had realised what cloth he was cut from; his main signing, Manuel Valls, has done a runner having confirmed he was nothing more than an extension of the furthest right with no qualms pacting with Vox; his financial, business and media supporters (what's happened to his appearances various times a day on the morning shows of the Spanish private TV stations?) feel ever more uncomfortable and part of the founding nucleus of Ciudadanos is giving itself ever greater distance from the leader who has anchored the party in the right-wing trifachito trio.
The man who chose as a provocative poster for the election for Catalan president in autumn 2006 an image of his whole body, naked, covering his genitals, now appears with spotless clothing but metaphorically undressed, almost naked, with all the contradictions of a party which believed that it could always do politics with lies alone.
In the same way that Madrid is normally unaware of what's happening in Catalonia and lacks a real understanding of the problem, something similar has happened to it with Albert Rivera: great fun when he was sidelining each and every Catalan symbol, but incapable of acting like the liberal he proclaims himself to be. Almost thirteen years it lasted, but now his mask has fallen off.